About my YA novel: Breakfast Served Anytime follows rising high school senior Gloria Bishop to Geek Camp, where she has been invited by a mysterious instructor called X to get unplugged and delve into the Secrets of the Written Word. Along the way she forges unlikely friendships, learns to understand the particular stirrings of her own heart and mind, and, of course, falls in love—not only with the world of books but also with a Boxer puppy named Holyfield, the Kentucky she has always been in such a big hurry to flee, and with hating the Mad Hatter, aka Mason Atkinson, aka the boy who has her number from the start. 

BREAKFAST SERVED ANYTIME

by Sarah Van Arsdale Combs

“We have to stop and be humble enough to understand

that there is something called mystery.”

— Paulo Coelho

Excerpt from CHAPTER 1: INTO THE ABYSS

The butterflies started showing up the night before I left for Geek Camp. The first one came as a surprise: an otherworldly blue messenger, lifting and settling her wings on the windshield of the wheezy Chrysler LeBaron I had inherited from my grandmother just months before. Carol was riding shotgun, and when I whacked her knee and pointed, she just slid her shades down her nose, rolled her eyes, and said, "They're everywhere, Glo. A plague of them. Creeparific." After that, just like when you learn a new word and suddenly it's all over the place, I started seeing the blue butterflies everywhere I looked. 

             I am a person who looks for signs. Obsessed since childhood with any form of written communication, it was not unusual for me, at age twelve, to tiptoe outside to our moonlit mailbox and fully expect to find within it (at midnight, on a random Tuesday!) a love note composed in Egyptian hieroglyphics or a grocery list scrawled in the shaky hand of the ghost of Boo Radley. Give me a fortune cookie, a Magic 8-Ball, a plague of blue butterflies, and I'll be sure to find in them some urgent message from the universe. Ask Carol: According to her, I'm a master of the Art of Arcane Communication, but a complete idiot when it comes to the Writing on the Wall. What happened at Geek Camp? It was like that. I never saw it coming, not even for half a second.

            That first magic blue butterfly stayed on the windshield of the Munch all the way to Dairy Queen. Carol’s the one who came up with that: The Munch, as in LeBaron von Munchausen. Carol’s dad is a psychologist so she’s always talking about stuff like Munchausen Syndrome. Carol has diagnosed half our class, and Munchausen Syndrome is apparently what Sophie Allen has because she’s always feigning illness to get out of gym class. Carol says I’m pretty normal, but that I’m prone to hyberbole and that I should work on impulse control. Impulse control? Are you kidding? We’d been in the car for ten minutes and Carol had already texted her boyfriend Oscar (pronounced “OH-scar,” because he is, in Carol’s words—and inarguably—a Cuban Demigod) at least four thousand times. 

That’s half the reason I couldn’t wait to go to Geek Camp: I was under obligation to check my personal electronic devices at the door. So once you get accepted to Geek Camp, you have to pick a class, or a “major” (camp is held on a college campus, blah blah blah, and the idea is to provide Kentucky’s “best and brightest” rising high school seniors with an early taste of collegiate life). You can sign up for Modern Dance, Japanese, Forensic Science, whatever, but I had listed as my first choice the cryptically named “Secrets of the Written Word,” to be taught by some guy who called himself Dr. Weston A. Xavier.  Several weeks before, I had received a beautifully handwritten letter (sealed with actual wax! I couldn’t believe it!) from this same Dr. Xavier:

Dear Students,

I look forward to meeting each of you and exploring with you the Secrets of the Written Word. Before we begin, I must ask that each of you please leave behind any personal computers, cellular telephones, or any other means by which you might find yourselves plugged in and tuned out from the wonders that lie ahead of us. It’s a challenge, and I’m asking you to rise to it. We’ll operate on the honor system and I trust it will work. By signing below, you enter into contract to abstain from your gadgets for the duration of our four weeks together. Bring a notebook and something to write with and you’ll have all the tools you need.

Sincerely,

X.

 “That is a freaking conspiracy right there,” Carol said when I showed her the letter. “X? He calls himself X?”

“Not even Doctor X. Just X.”

 “Oh my god, what a jackass!” Carol said. “Are you sure you want to be part of this freakshow?” In two seconds, Carol had whipped out her iPhone and was Googling away, which of course I had already done.

“There’s nothing anywhere online about a Weston A. Xavier,” I informed her. “It’s a pseudonym, Carol, hello.” I had to admit it: I was intrigued. Hook, line, and sinker-level intrigued.

“Oh well excuse me,” Carol said. “Mr. Pseudonymous X, of course. Mr. Pretentious Monogram. You know, I bet this is all some secret psychological experiment where somebody—some guy who’s probably a perv, Glo—is trying to see if kids can function without Facebook.”

“Whatever,” I said, but I could understand Carol’s logic. “Who says the guy’s a perv? He’s probably just a bitter old man who wishes he were teaching at Yale instead of wasting his summer at some bush-league high school academic camp.”

“I’m just saying,” Carol said, waving the letter in my face. “Maybe this is your golden ticket and oh, wait, oh my god, if you can keep clear of your phone and your laptop for a month, you’ll win a chocolate factory in the end!”

            I rolled my eyes. Conspiracy or not, I was looking forward to a break from the constant racket of modern technology. I mean, I haul a cell phone around and have a Facebook account, blah blah blah, but that doesn’t mean I’m cut out for that stuff.  First of all, on Facebook I’m more of a silent lurker than an active participant. Don’t even get me started on the whole Pandora’s Box element—it poses a constant threat to my emotional well-being. Secondly, I’m in the bad habit of losing or breaking small, expensive items (my retainer, my contacts), so when I finally caved under my paranoid parents’ insistence that I go cellular in the name of Unforeseen Emergencies (so far they haven’t happened; so far the phone has proven to be not a life preserver but a glorified umbilical cord connecting me to more sound and fury than I know what to do with), I was forced to accept what is the mobile phone equivalent of a Jurassic-era dinosaur.

Third: It is physically impossible for me not to compose text messages in complete sentences in words that contain all their natural-born letters. By the time I have pecked out a response to, say, an urgent text from Carol (“omg did u hear?????????”) in my own laborious, long-winded, correctly capitalized and carefully punctuated way (“No. Did I miss something? Tell me!”), Carol will have already sent like three more urgent messages in the interim. I can handle Latin, I can amo amas amat all day long, but I suck at text-ese and I’m constantly behind. It’s exhausting.

Anyway, I still had a few precious hours to go before surrendering to X and the Luddite life for four weeks. Carol and I ate our Blizzards in the Munch like we always do.  The convertible top was rolled down, and the sunlight slanting through the trees was getting soft and syrupy in that way that makes you miss things that aren’t even gone yet. This was our goodbye trip to DQ, because Carol was about to leave for her own summer adventure, a crazy-elite ballet school in New York City.

            “You know,” Carol said in her thoughtful voice, “In New York you can get a hoagie or a Rolex or whatever on the street at like four in the morning, but I don’t think they have a DQ.”

            “Seriously?”

            “Seriously. No Blizzards.”

            “Yikes. That’s worse than no Internet.”

            “Almost,” Carol laughed, poking at a chunk of cookie dough with her spoon. “So we’re going to have to kick it old-school? Real letters, stamps and all?”

“Yep,” I said. I was getting excited just thinking about it. Especially the stamps. Especially the part where Carol’s letters and postcards would show up in an actual mailbox. Geek Camp was starting to become real, and a rush of nervous anticipation fizzed through my body.

“Okay,” Carol said. “Just don’t expect me to be all prolific. I’m going to hold you personally responsible when my ass gets carpal tunnel.”

“I’m pretty sure your carpals are in your wrists, not your ass.”

“Well then kiss my carpals, bee-otch.”

We were cracking ourselves up, but what we were really doing is trying hard not to think about a whole summer without each other. The excitement I felt a second before took a sudden slide into the realm of panic. It seemed impossible, unthinkable, that Carol and I would be separated (by 800 miles!) for the first time in the history of a friendship that began the day skinny little Carol from Alaska walked into sixth-grade language arts class. Instead of behaving with customary New Girl humility, she acted like she owned the school as soon as she breezed in. Like so many of the things I love best in life, I hated Carol at first. A ballet dancer? From Alaska? She may as well have been a unicorn from the dark side of the moon. Later, I found out that not only did we share a portentous birthday (the Ides of March), but we were also both named for our grandmothers. Gloria and Carol: two totally geriatric names in a class that included no fewer than three girls called Kayla. I took it as a sign, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Our friend the butterfly stowaway was still there on the windshield, folding and unfolding her marvelous blue wings. Call it hyperbole, call it whatever you want, but I’m telling you that it looked like she was waving, like she was going goodbye goodbye goodbye. Another sign from the universe, of course. It’s important to pay attention to these things. We finished our Blizzards and cranked the seats back so we could stare up at the darkening sky for a while. We sat in silence as Carol’s phone buzzed with the incoming messages of Oscar the Cuban Demigod. “I’m not even going to pick that up,” Carol said, looking over at me and grinning. “That’s how much I’m going to miss your Luddite ass.”

I’m not a chronic cryer or anything, but when I dropped Carol off in front of her house, it was all I could do not to bawl. We hugged each other like crazy and promised to write.

*

I hadn’t been in the door for three seconds when my mom asked the same thing she’d been asking me for days: “Have you packed yet? Are you packing? Did you make sure to pack (fill in the blank) and plenty of (fill in this blank, too)?”

If there’s one thing I don’t get, it’s the business of packing in advance. I mean, if half the stuff you’re going to need is the stuff you’re wearing right now, or the stuff you’re going to sleep in, or the stuff you’ll need in the morning when you go to wash your hair and brush your teeth, then what’s the point of packing it all away and getting it back out again? Ridiculous. But to appease my mother I shut myself in my room to commence “packing.”

First I tuned my iPod to my Thinking Playlist so I could think. Next, in a move that I realized had become automatic, a bodily response to an actual physical urge not unlike the urge to yawn or pee, I checked Facebook.  After thinking for way too long about what might constitute a clever farewell, I finally settled on “Gloria Aaron Bishop is hereby headed into the Abyss. Parting is such sweet sorrow! Enjoy your summer, my lovelies.” Then, with a click, I snapped shut my laptop. It was dizzying to think of everything I would miss, had already missed, but it was thrilling, too, and I couldn’t wait for life at Geek Camp to begin.